As BlackBerry fights for its life, BB10 called ‘irrelevant’

Things are not looking very good for BlackBerry right now. After the Street built up investor confidence over the past few months, BlackBerry posted a huge miss last week as it revealed a surprise loss for the May quarter. The company also managed to lose 4 million net subscribers despite finally launching the Q10 and registering its first full quarter of Z10 sales. There are a number of reasons BlackBerry continues to struggle — many of them dating back several years — but one industry watcher really put things in perspective this past weekend.

Enders Analysis’ Benedict Evans on Sunday briefly discussed one of BlackBerry’s biggest problems in his weekly newsletter. It’s a catch 22: there isn’t much reason at this point for developers to concern themselves with BlackBerry 10 since sales are so low, and smartphone users aren’t likely to adopt BlackBerry 10 until their favorite apps are made available on the platform.

Evans used hard numbers to support his simple point:

“Blackberry had disappointing results – and the stock collapsed by over half at one point in the day,” Evans wrote. “The new BB10 phones are selling OK but not great. There’s nothing exactly wrong with BB10 (though it appears to be pretty buggy), but why would you develop for it when iOS has 400m live devices and Android over 800m? It’s irrelevant.”

BlackBerry shares closed down 1.63% on Monday after having plummeted more than 25% following the company’s earnings report on Friday.